Who knew that Ahmadinejad read Andy Borowitz?
President of Iran Declares War on Sparta Vows to Nuke 300 WarriorsIn what foreign policy experts believe to be a direct response to the hit movie “300,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today declared war on Sparta.
Even for the mercurial Mr. Ahmadinejad, the move struck many diplomatic insiders as extraordinary, since the consensus in the international community is that the city-state of Sparta no longer exists.
But according to a close associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president’s thoughts turned to war after seeing a matinee showing of “300” this past Saturday at the Tehran Cineplex 12....
The NY Times today:
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, obliquely attacked the hit Warner Brothers film “300” in a televised speech to mark the Iranian New Year on Wednesday, Variety.com reported. While not mentioning the film, about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., by name, he accused Western powers of “trying to tamper with history by making a film and by making Iran’s image look savage.” Last week, his cultural adviser, Javad Shangari, declared the film “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological warfare aimed against Iranian culture.” Warner Brothers said, “The studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the sole purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political statement.”
I will be teaching a course this fall that I’ve taught before, Contemporary Civilization, which is a greatest hits of western moral and political philosophy. I usually like to show some films if I can, both because the students enjoy it and because the films can help make the issues we discuss feel more contemporary. But I always have a harder time picking films for the fall half of the course (ancient to early modern) than for the spring (modern), which is why I need your help and suggestions.
The reading list includes: The Bible, The Qur’an, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epicurus, Augustine, Averroës, Aquinas, Maimonides, Luther, Calvin, More, Galileo, Newton, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Voltaire. And here are some of the main themes we discuss:
As you can see, all pretty light questions.
I have a few ideas already. Ikiru for the discussion on what makes life good/happy. Possibly The Mission or A Man for all Seasons for discussions about religion, though the first I saw a very long time ago and the second I’ve never seen, so I’m not sure how good these films are. And maybe The Lord of the Flies for discussing Hobbes, Locke, and the state of nature, but there are several versions of this and I don’t know which is best. I most need films about religion, science, and the way communities/states ideally do (or do not) function.
Anyone? Anyone?
Bombing for Democracy?
Are You Qualified to Stand for Peace? This test is for your consideration. If you can pass it you are eligible to join the peace movement. This test consists of one (1) multiple-choice question (so you better get it right!) Here's a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
In how many of these instances did a democratic government, respectful of human rights, occur as a direct result?
Choose one of the following:
(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1
This quiz is compliments of Vietnam Veterans Against the War .
| Quiz | War
Humor appears in the unlikeliest of places. I wouldn't normally say that the experience of writing my dissertation is laugh-filled, but sometimes I come across humorous correspondence. The latest find is a letter from an English zoologist to his wife, describing NYC drinking laws in 1907, based on a trip to the Endicott Hotel bar. First, though bars were allowed, it was illegal to pass the drinks *across* the bar (there was even a curtain dropped down in front of the bar to prevent this from happening); instead they had to be carried around the end. But better yet, each table had a tiny sandwich on it, which legalized the drinks, since no drink was to be served except with a meal. The same sandwich legalized many "meals". It was called a Raines sandwich, after the politician who introduced the law.
| Food | History | Law | New York City
Some super-sleuthing by concerned mom Jeanne Heifetz has led to the discovery that the writers of the New York State Regents English exam routinely censor passages from the works of well-known authors in order to remove all references to profanity, race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, violence, and even alcohol. My favorite example of this new absurdity:
"A paragraph in John Holt's "Learning All the Time" is truncated to eliminate some of the reasons Suzuki violin instruction differs in Japan and the United States, apparently not to offend anyone who might find the particulars somehow insulting. Students are nonetheless then asked to answer questions about those differences."
Check it out: The Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts
| Education | New York City
Los Angeles Times: The Rarely Told Story of WWII
Our tactics in the "good war" aren't any less brutal than our tactics in the present war. Excerpt below.
| History | Military | War | WWII
by Salman Rushdie
[From today's NYT -- the whole piece can be read here..]
"This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't afford to suggest that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Why did those 10,000 men armed with swords and axes mass on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?
Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leadership, among others, that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani ex-sports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al Qaeda's guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al Qaeda's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings)? Why all the talk about American military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents?
Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that mean?
| Religion | Salman Rushdie | War on Terror
